Salem-News.com is an Independent Online Newsgroup in the United States, setting the standard for the future of News.Publisher:Bonnie KingCONTACT:Newsroom@Salem-news.comAdvertising:Adsales@Salem-news.com~Truth~~Justice~~Peace~TJP

Making Monkey of Bird Flu

John Fletcher Special to Salem-News.com

Industrial ag (Big Pharm) used the hoax of avian flu to slaughter the birds of poor farmers across Asia.

chinadaily.com.cn

(CHICAGO) - Raising chickens in the city is a means to support local organic food systems and to provide food security to any family. Increasing numbers of cities are changing laws to legalize raising chickens.

While these changes in law seem good as they remove conflict between communities and a local government that should be serving their interests, the public should not be "grateful." They should remember that having one's own source of food is a human right.

What's more, it is clear that chickens and other poultry are an excellent means of mosquito and tick control, a large public health boon. That being so, the case for people raising chickens in cities should be settled for good and all. Raising poultry in the city then leaves only issues of doing so in a clean and quiet way but laws to cover neglect or nuisances are already on the books for many activities.

While local governments have stopped people from having this beneficial source of food available to them and a means to control insects, the federal government, without public or scientific input or any hearings, has planned to release genetical engineered mosquitoes in Florida, allegedly to kill off normal mosquitoes that might harbor diseases. Yet the fact that GMO mosquitoes could do vast unknown harm to animal and human life, and there is no way to recall them once there are released, is without doubt.

Keeping chickens which eat mosquitoes thus become not just a source of food but a defense against the government's ill-conceived and involuntary biologic experiment on everyone.

Once one begins to realize how beneficial poultry has been to people, and all the diverse varieties they come in, poultry seems quite a wonder. Poultry has lived in close contact with humans for millennia, being fed by people and offering food, pest control, and even company and delight, in return. The story of the goose who laid the golden egg conveys our past understanding of how valuable poultry is to humans.

But the individual raising of poultry was dealt a devastating blow by the Bush administration in its concoction of "avian flu" - a bonanza for the biotech industry and to Rumsfeld and other members of Bush's administration with ties to it.

Industrial ag (Big Pharm) used the hoax of avian flu to slaughter the birds of poor farmers across Asia, removing the competition and wiping out indigenous biodiversity in poultry. Just as they used the threat of swine flu to come in and slaughter the Haitian pigs which were the mainstay of poor Haitians. Just as hoax of swine flu itself was used to sell billions in untested and deadly H1N1 vaccines.

But avian flu was the worse. Using it as the big bugaboo, a threat of the return of a pandemic that could kill millions as Bush said the 1918 flu had done (flu didn't, a new pharmaceutical industry product did), pandemic laws were pushed through by Bush in the US that are martial law, absent any public health measures, and which can be triggered without any proof. He used a false terror, just as he used the lie of 9/11, to set in place laws for massive control.

This use of disease for totalitarian control is not new.

Academic medicine has been and is the most important pillar of support of all dictatorships and governments which do not want to submit to written law, to constitutions, to human rights, that is, to the democratically legitimized social contract.

So it is not only for the truth of the science that one must expose avian flu as a lie but for the sake of democracy, including the seemingly small but actually crucial human right to raise one's own food (chickens, in this case). It is a right that the US government removed for millions of small farmers across Asia and in Haiti, using disease scares and "public health measures" that were anti-public health.

And it's happening right now in Sri Lanka. In reading the article what becomes apparent is how the entire effort is based simply on fear. There is no threat whatsoever but they are moving into action based on fear of some terrible catastrophe, and one that only might occur. But if it does, "millions will die." Exactly the words used by Bush about pandemics as he put laws into place for martial law in the US. Emphasis was added to show that what they are doing in Sri Lanka is even blatantly based on nothing.

"We have carried out extensive tests and confirmed that a few birds had H5N2 strain of flu which is not the virulent H5N1 bird flu," de Silva told AFP. "We decided to destroy the animals [6000 of them, not just the ones with mild H5N2] as a precautionary measure." [Emphasis added.]

He said local scientists feared that the milder form of the virus could mutate.

"There have been no cases of H5N1 detected in Sri Lanka," de Silva said.

The last sentence contains the traditional terror zinger - "readily transmissible to humans," and "cause millions of deaths." This is based on nothing. It hasn't happened. What millions of deaths have ever occurred from a virus? If your mind jumps to the "1918 Spanish flu," it might be salutary to learn that the 1918 Spanish flue wasn't a flu or Spanish. Yes, people died in the millions, not from a flu but a new synthetic product and from the use of terror to drive the sales of it.

As one looks deeper at avian flu, one might consider that the industry promoting animal disease scares as "potentially capable of killing millions" has itself killed more human beings than any other cause in human history and immensely profited in the process.

"We who have been bombarded with the threat of imminent doom from the health authorities will notice the important difference here:

Lanka isn’t trying to hypnotize you into believing that you have no control over your health, biology or being. He’s asking that we all think critically and thoughtfully for a change. [Emphasis in the original.]

Why are birds getting ill?

“Since the late 19th century, diseases of poultry in mass animal farming have been observed: Bluecolouring of the crest, decrease in egglaying performance, sagging of the feathers, and sometimes these animals die too. These diseases were called bird pest.

In present-day mass poultry farming, in particular when hens are being raised in cages, many animals die each day as a result of species-alien animal [factory] farming. After a time, these consequences of mass animal farming were no longer called bird pest, but bird flu.

So for decades, we have been told that a transferable virus is the cause of this, in order to deflect from the actual causes.

If one hen lays fewer eggs or gets a blue crest and that hen is tested H5N1-positive too, then all the other hens are gassed. That is how there got to be those 100 million apparently H5N1-killed hens.”

What did people who were suspected to have the bird flu die of?

“Persons with symptoms of a cold, who then had the bad luck to fall into the hands of H5N1 hunters, were killed withenormous amounts of chemotherapy [chemical pharmaceuticals] supposed to restrain the phantom virus. Isolated in plastic tents, surrounded by madmen in space suits, they died, in panicky fear, from multiple organ failures.”

How can a layman check on this?

".... ask in what publication you can find the electron microscope photo of this supposedly reconstructed virus. There is no such publication.”

How do we address these issues?

Anyone can ask the Ministry for Consumer Protection, the Ministry for Public Health etc for that scientific proof which would justify the bird flu panic.

Anyone who waits for “the others” to do something should not wonder why nothing is done and why the situation gets much worse. In the final instance we, the citizens, stand behind this, in that we for years have done nothing about it, and have seen the whole madness around us and tolerated it. Here we must begin to take social responsibility, if we do not want to surrender and sacrifice ourselves to the total domination and chaos of an uncontrolled pseudoscience.”

It's time that avian flu be exposed. It's an agribusiness invention. A "flight" of fancy.

Keeping chickens (and ducks) need to be recognized as human right. It is a means for any family to have a good daily source of safe protein, a means of pest control, and a means for everyone to become involved in protecting the biodiversity of farm animals.

We are at a moment in history when the biotech/pharmaceutical industry is wiping out biodiversity of crops with now proven false PR about greater yields and drought tolerance and feeding the poor. They are doing an analogous thing in working to wipe out biodiversity in normal (organic) animals, using disease scares. They want to insert their own genetically engineered animals which will be falsely touted as well, as "animal disease resistant."

Raising chickens in the city is a way to become part of dispersed ark to save biodiversity in animals. And Obama's new Monsanto-driven food safety law, FMSA, includes the use of military and DHA to slaughter animals if an animal disease outbreak is declared (it doesn't have to be proven or any threat to humans or even animals) . The public needs to know what is planned. The attempt by industrial agriculture to get rid of heritage breeds of animals has already begun in Michigan.

In knowing how false the avian flu is, how false the H1N1 was, in letting local and state officials know, people can stop being afraid. And in letting go of fear, the public stops going along with totalitarian control over itself.

The pharmaceutical industry (biotech)'s absolute disinterest in public health is reflected in their plan to release genetically engineered mosquitoes without scientific studies or any public hearings. Cute and silly chickens are an antidote.

Time to get chickens (or ducks or guinea) which can give us joy and food and meanwhile protect us from crazy government actions that include mutant mosquitoes.

" .... all our lauded technological progress - our very civilization - is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal." Albert Einstein